Courtesy of the OPW Staff
Questions or comments
****webmaster@bizwarehouse.com*****
us your thoughts.
Or visit our Homepage
Foreword
The information below is designed to help you create an effective and professional looking web site on a small budget. To start, you need storage space somewhere on the web. Many access providers have a few megs set aside for each account. OPW uses AOL which allows us 10 megs of space and prior to unlimited service some really huge AOL bills. However, we do have access to some very good free customer service. That is a key component when building and maintaining your site. We designed another site with a different web company and the customer service is ...... extremely poor. Each new problem takes two weeks and a few nasty letters to be resolved..
Check with your provider to see if they offer free space with the account. If not, shop around. There are plenty of providers with free space available. And always check out the customer service, otherwise you too can say the service is....poor and wait forever to fix something simple.
On a positive note, web sites are fun and will let the world know who you are. The internet is the future and it's best to get yourself established as soon as possible.
Update 2/17/96: Many thanks to all who sent us additional resources! We have some new additions due out in a couple of weeks! Please visit again and feel free to participate... Don't forget send us a message if you find a bad link.
Before you begin to download the software needed to build your site, you will want some protection from programs called viruses. A simple definition of a virus can be: A program written for the pupose of doing permanent damage to a hard drive.
Your computer is at risk when you download from the internet. To prevent this from happening, you need an "anti-virus" program to kill any nasty bugs in the downloaded software. Although it didn't seem to matter when we got the wazzu virus. Perhaps the undisputed champion "anti-virus" software is from McAfee. Visit their site to get a sample copy of the program at:
There are two ways to get your web pages into Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). You can be like a friend of ours who writes HTML with a text editor (Calls himself the unabomber HTML writer). Or you can get an HTML editor which allows you to type English and converts the text into HTML. We use the latter because it is too easy. There are several programs around. Below are some of the better ones. The OPW site was created with GNN press. Our descision was based on the amount of customer service we received from GNN. GNNpress has now become AOL press and is available from AOL directly.
Software name: Hot Dog- This program requires a few files that are easily located at Sausage and or on AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve.
Software Name: AOL Press or Navipress
SoftWare Name Microsoft Frontpage
http://www.microsoft.com (Please check to see if your service provider accepts frontpage extensions befor using this product) We have a new site under development that uses some of the better extensions.)
Mag's
Big List of HTML Editors
Graphics do add to the image of your site. Too many graphics will slow a viewer's download time. Many people will just hit stop and go elsewhere if your site doesn't appear within a few seconds. Such is the case with one of our competitors. They went super high tech. It takes 8 minutes to load their homepage and another 12 minutes to get to the products page. We are very pleased they like to waste a customers time like that. You want visitors to be able to zip through the site, get what they came for and get on with their lives.
There are many sites with free clipart images. You need only to visit a search engine and type in, "clipart" to find them. For those of you who have CD ROMS of images from companies such as Corel or others, you will need to convert the images into the .gif or .jpg formats. One of the best programs around is called Paint Shop Pro. A free sample is availble at:
Software Name: Paint Shop Pro
This program will also allow you to create your own images.
An incredible amount of graphics related software and links can be found at:
http://www2.ncsu.edu/bae/people/faculty/walker/hotlist/graphics.html
Now that you have your HTML editor and your graphics needs are satisfied, creating the web site and putting it on the web are next. There are several programs that are designed to FTP ( File Transfer Protocal) your pages onto the web. If you went with AOL press then you don't need to download anything else to get going. For the others, you need a program called WS_FTP. It's easy to use and has been called the best by many.
Software name: ws_ftp
There are many ways to get people to visit your site. The most effective and common way is to list yourself with the search engines. Each engine is different and has restricions and other items to look for. We planned to write an article on these differences and provide some excellent tips on how to submit URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) to the engines. That was until we discovered another site that outlines everything you need know about promoting your site. Visit:
Author: Jim Rhodes
How to promote your business web site
Be sure to check out his other pages regarding marketing and web site design.
We like this site and the attitude presented.
(We don't agree with everything there, we are guilty of putting up a visitor counter.)
Misc. Software
Below is a small list of software programs you may wish to download.
Free Agent: A Newsreader that works very well and is considered the best.
News X-press : Another excellent newsreader
Netscape : The "world's" premier browser
Pegasus Mail : Mail client
Eudora mail : Mail client
Where is Internet Explorer yo